I see this shot often and I've been lusting after it for months. Sacrifice: when I'm out for a run, stopping for a minute or two to take this shot means my run-time is going to be rubbish. Worth it, in this case.
Result of post-processing has been a slightly HDRish look. Up to the viewer to decide if that is justified - I think it adds to the juxtaposition.

As part of the Brisbane Festival, every night there has been a light show over the Brisbane River.
I had a spot in mind to photograph this from at Southbank, but missed my train and got there late. Southbank was packed with people, and in the end it didn't matter as my lens was not wide enough. Luckily they have two showings per night, so I hung around (and had a picnic with Evelyn), and set myself up on the Kurilpa Bridge for the second run.
I was set up with the tripod and cable release. For the first show, I was doing my test shots while the show was on! For the second show, I had time to test the light and see that between 60 and 120 seconds was a good exposure. With the magic of raw + Lightroom, and knowing that I didn't necessarily need to keep the colours true, I had great leverage with the exposure.

I love these watches, and I've wanted one ever since primary school (when this was a new design). Thanks to the buying power of the internet, they are cheap! So now I've bought one... water resistant - sweet! So the first one drowned, and I bought another one. That one (pictured) drowned too.
Alas, it is water resistant only for "everyday use". This means it can take a splash. It does NOT meant you can take it swimming at the beach.
I have now invested in a slightly less awesome-looking Casio W-202, which is rated to 50m.
(What I'd really love is one that looks like the F-91W but can take a swim.)

This is a panorama of a really narrow alley and building site in Fortitude Valley.
This is stitched from 15 images, and there are some stitching errors because of the tight confines and really wide-angle shots. Hugin found about 2900 control points and I added a few hundred more manually.

This is the former site of some industrial buildings at Bundamba. Bunnings has bought the entire block.
Wandering home from the train station after a night out, I put my camera through the fence to snap these nine images. They are stitched together using Microsoft ICE (Image Composite Editor).

This is a sculpture called Fish Fossil, by Christopher Trotter and made in 1995 from scrap metal and concrete.
Mum asked many months ago to find this sculpture and take a photo, and I have been searching for it all of this time. I knew it existed because I had seen photos, but it eluded me every time. As it turns out, this is because I was always riding past on my bike, and it is tilted in such a way that when riding past, it's almost invisible. I finally spotted it when I was training for Bridge to Brisbane and jogged past it.

I went for breakfast with family (happy birthday Cora for yesterday, and Ramon for today!). I knew there were plenty of photos to be had in the area, but when dad suggested we go for a bike ride, we ended up riding 35km and passed the wreck of the HMQS Gayundah.
It's Lui's birthday as well (happy birthday Lui!), and she spent the day with her mum (and without me in her hair).

The Workshops Rail Museum had a free-entry weekend so we popped over for a look. This photo was taken on a tour of the steam train workshops.
Not long after this, there was a spewpocalypse - the kind where it was better for all concerned that we just packed up and went home to hose everything off.

We wanted a poncho towel for Evelyn (maybe because Amelia has one!) but the ones available in stores were too expensive or flimsy quality. Lui decided to make her own, and after no small amount of effort, here it is!
Instructions for how to make this poncho towel are at sandy toes and popsicles blog. This is pinned on Pinterest as well.

This round of veggie growing has not been as successful as previous years. We are host and victim of various pests and demons. The Cape Gooseberry is susceptible to the flea beetle. These things breed quickly and can eat a whole plant in a week. After that, they go to ground and will chow down on any new tree that is planted.
I normally cut off the leaves that have grubs, and put them in a glass jar to die off in the sun. I saved this one long enough for an IR + macro shot on mini tripod. I don't think it worked perfectly, possibly because of the focus point difference between normal light and IR light. I started off at f/7.1, then f/11, then settled on f/13.
The dark spots are the parts of the leaf that the larvae have eaten.

Alan Warren gave me the heads up that the protest was being broken up and moved along. He posted some shots on Google+ as it was happening. When I arrived at 7.20am, I was in time to see the last protesters being carried away.
I took lots of shots of people chanting, which would have been alright if I'd not gotten anything else. I also shot wide-open (f/4), because I wanted some of the background to be blurred (and the observers - having them in focus would be distracting). This was at the expense of sharpness of the main subject, but considering the situation and ultimate use of the photo, I thought that was a reasonable trade-off.
A little birdy told me that it will cost the Brisbane City Council $30-40k to re-turf Post Office Square after the tents killed the grass. I think it would come back quickly enough without being re-turfed - bit of a waste of money don'tcha think? (And isn't that what it's all about?)

Spent an afternoon and evening at the abandoned TAFE. For this picture, I stood still while Al light painted around me with the light sabers (one on red, one on purple). This also lit up the room. He painted for about 30 seconds, and then we ducked out of frame and left the shutter open for another few minutes to catch the ambient light.

This is my first experiment with Hugin to generate a panorama. The image is made up of 12 source images. I originally shot this as a 9-bracketed exposure HDR as well but that didn't work out so well. Definitely will try the HDR panorama on something else next time.

Alan and Mick invited me to a drain in Brisbane's south... for light painting. Final shot for the night: Alan set up his four LED lights pointing at the grafitti. Mick set his camera for long exposure, and I sat to the right copying his steps and settings, but with a different angle and lens.

This is an abandoned factory on the Sunshine Coast. Went there with urbex pals Al, Mick, David and Cameron.
A conveyor belt, presumably a sorting machine. David's brake lights randomly turn on every now and again, and they did this while I was setting up the test shot. Test shot came out quite nicely, so I lit this with my other light saber (which still has a working red LED).

I read up about phones being set up with credit card contactless payment abilities, and though I'm certainly not the first, I thought I'd give it a go (ha ha) with my Go Card. See this Finextra article for my inspiration (link via Yammer). Mine is a much, much lower-tech version, and no warranties were voided! Update 5 Nov 2011:A further link from ITNews. Still a lot more effort and less compatible than my solution!
For the photo setup itself, I wanted to get a shot of the phone itself and the Go Card, all in view and in focus. With the close range, and being hand held, the only way I could do this was with the help of the massive depth of field of the fish-eye filter. The lighting is quite even at work, so there were few shadows.

This is a painting table that I was going to use to set off a sparkler bomb, until Alan and I both realised that we didn't have a lighter or matches. Next time!
Alan set up lights in various points around the place to light up the scene.

Gold Coast's beaches have been eroding for a while now, and with this week's terrible weather, they have taken quite a beating. All beaches at Miami and Nobby Beach are shut for the time being as there is now a sizable gap between the beach access steps and the sand!

Spent an afternoon and evening at the abandoned TAFE. Al did a steel-wool burn in the ceramics block. I accidentally left my camera on the wrong settings and this shot was overexposed. Al did another one for my benefit, but the first one actually turned out better. In addition to the burn, there was a flash of blue light from the right of frame.

Photo outing with Al, Mick, Anthony, David and Steve. It was rainy but there were some clear moments. Lights from The Port of Brisbane to the right.
Exposure was controlled by intervalometer: 3 second delay, then 90 second exposure. Guessed/calculated the exposure based on the test shot (at ISO 25k)

At the penguin tank, I took many photos trying to get an engaging pose. I had a limited number of places that I could stand where there were not any reflections on the glass from lights and other spectators.

The fireworks show to kick off Brisbane's River Festival is always a winner. I was going to set up in my normal secret* location along the north bank of the river, but I had no-one to go with this year. Erin, my old m9 from uni and IRC days said there was plenty of room at their perch at New Farm. I had Evelyn for the day as well (Lui had a day off). Dave (Erin's husband) loaned me his Sigma 10-20mm lens (I was going to use my poor man's super-wide-angle but the Sigma is far superior).
The shot I had imagined I would take was of Evelyn's face as the fireworks washed over them. In reality, that would have been far too difficult to do with just me and a tripod so I have deferred that until next year (when Lui can be there to hold Evelyn). For this shot, instead, I lined up the shot so the bridge and fireworks would be in, and then marked up a spot where I would stand with Evelyn and be in the shot, triggering the shutter with the cable release.
* Not especially secret, but there are no toilets there (so not good for mummies and daddies) and no fences (so not good for babies).

[2011-04-23] Ron and I gurneyed about a third of the house. Looks like new (as much as a 50-60 year old house can). A few notes: 1) The door to the laundry from the carport doesn't normally get wet. 2) The laundry needed mopping anyway.

Alan Warren, AKA The Best Photographic Buddy A Guy Could Have, obtained permission to be on the property and access these abandoned buildings. A few things worked against me this time: I have broken my 18-55 lens, so no wide angle; plus Evelyn wouldn't sleep, so by the time I got there, everyone was packing up. Alan, Ollie and Sam very kindly came back in with me and Ollie did some more light painting, though without wide angle lens, I wasn't able to capture them effectively.
When the boys set off home, I stayed behind to set up some shots. This shot was of me walking down the hall, pointing the floor as I ambled along for about 45 seconds. The dark line on the left is a shadow created because I was carrying the torch in my right hand. For the last 15 seconds, I lit up the room at the end of the hall from the doorway, which also resulted in my silhouette.

Ipswich show, crowds on a Saturday night. One of my first long exposures with this camera, and there's a lot to learn and think about for next time.
There's two ways to get a shake-free long exposure with this camera: self-timer or use the wifi remote control and smartphone app. I've not had much success with the latter, but I suspect my home wifi was crowding it out.
For this shot, I went with the former - the self-timer. The RX100 has a few modes. One I employed this night is the Self-Timer Continuous, which will wait10 seconds, then take 5 photos in a row with no further intervention. I've used this for group portraits as well, but tonight I was using it to stack photos together - or take 5 and pick the best.
Only downside to this is there doesn't seem to be a way to stop it - I managed to lock the camera up and had to take the battery out. That happens.

Today was the Brisbane Zombie Walk, aiming to the biggest of its kind in the world. Many thousands of people dressed as zombies as shuffled the streets of Brisbane city.
My aim today was to use the fisheye lens to get right up close to people, then use Lightroom to stretch these out to ultra-wide angle photos. I have a lot to learn and I do best by trial and error.
More Photos at my Facebook and the official page. Generic info at Wikipedia.

This was shot for the Street Photography Now challenge 32: "Follow lines of movement for a graphic journey". I'm not sure if this counts as street photography. It is composed of two images, first a 5" shot (using near-infrared filter as an ND filter), and second was a normal daytime exposure.

This is an abandoned factory on the Sunshine Coast. Went there with urbex pals Al, Mick, David and Cameron.
This is the silo and assorted supporting parts. Lit by my lightsaber buried under a pile of rubbish. The red LED died (or maybe just disconnected) part way through this.
A challenge in this shot was the high temperature (even at midnight) causing higher than normal sensor noise.

I never get tired of taking distorted photos of things. (That's an exaggeration; I didn't take any for over a year.) This is The Old Windmill in Spring Hill, apparently the oldest (European) structure still standing in Queensland, built in 1828.

This is an abandoned factory on the Sunshine Coast. Went there with urbex pals Al, Mick, David and Cameron.
This is the front building, and the only area with any noticeable graffiti. Tried to shoot this first up to catch some lightning to the left. However the rain was also hitting straight on the lens, which wasn't optimal. Came back once the rain had stopped.

To contrast with the previous photo of pests bothering the Cape Gooseberry, here is a photo of one of the fruit lanterns. The fruit inside is immature, having fallen from the plant too early. I've documented the setup of this photo below. The idea was to get a back-lit shot showing the detail of the lantern and a shadow of the fruit.
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="224" caption="1. Ingredients for this photo: Cape Gooseberry fruit, with lantern in-tact; One small torch; And a tray of spice jars"][/caption]
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="2. I chose the spice jar tray as it was the first thing that I saw that would let me stand the torch up and balance the fruit on top."][/caption]
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="3. Turn torch on, and snap bracketed photos. I didn't measure the focusing distance but from memory it's about 5-7cm"][/caption]

This is up on the roof of the block. Blue light using one of Alan's flashlights, orb with Alan's orb tool, and wavy lines with my light sabers. Five minute exposure to get some star movement, with two-odd minutes of light painting and the rest to capture the ambient light.

On the roof of this building, these seem to be ventilation / air conditioning stacks. For this shot, I controlled the cameras while Alan walked between each stack and fired off alternating green and orange flashes.
In Alan's version of this shot, he also fired off two shots to light up the front of the nearest stacks. This actually gave quite a different feel to the shot.

Something has been eating our strawberries. Lui suspect lizards, however we caught these snail-lets red handed scoffing them.
I picked the strawberry and put it on the BBQ (not the hot plate!) for a photograph. I only managed two shots before it scurried away.

Spent an afternoon and evening at the abandoned TAFE. This is a small lecture theatre with small projector room. Al set up a torch in the projector room, and some flashes triggered by his camera. The rest of us set up our cameras along the front row. We then jumped into different seats for each exposure, trying not to (and almost succeeding) double up on seats. Since my camera is the oldest and loudest, we all used its noisy mirror slap as the trigger to move to a new seat for the next exposure.
The lecture theatre itself was a bit worse for wear. Aside from the vandalism, the roof had a leak which had rotted away the ceiling and the floor below it. In the dark between shots, Al found that spot, and fell in.

Lui had an exam and I had a few hours to fill with Evelyn. Decided to drive up to Toohey Mountain and go for a short bush walk. By short, I mean about a kilometre. Evelyn decided about ten metres in that she would rather be carried. She enjoyed pulling bark off the trees (when I let her) and sitting down on ants.

Every fourth Sunday there are markets at Bundamba, and every second Sunday the Queensland Pioneer Steam Railway runs steam trains along this track for the general public. This has been on my list of things to shoot since the start of the year, but each Sunday I've opted to sleep in and/or do other stuff.
For the shot itself, I stood next to the tracks until the train set off, and took a lot of practice shots. I used a polariser to darken the sky and make sure the smoke and steam was set off against the clouds.

This picture is a total exposure of 1 hr 44 mins. The location has the transmission towers for foreground interest, but also has a lot of interfering lights. I set up the camera and intervelometer, then hid away in the car, checking periodically. I was actually out there for half an hour more than this, but the battery seems to have died shortly after the 1h44m mark.
I spent several hours over two days editing and pondering about the final effect. This is plainly overprocessed, and is not a realistic picture by any measure. I think there's perhaps a bit too much going on here, however it does fit in with the recent theme of light painting.
Since my lens hood has not yet arrived from HK, I blutacked some black cardboard to the side of the lens, though that only helped with the side flare.

On an evening walk in the Valley. Brunswick St, near the train station, this store seems to have shut down. There is nothing clean or shiny in this corner of town.
* Note: Must have been just a stocktake.

My R72 filter (infrared only) has been delivered from HK and I've been keen to try it out. I'm still learning what works and what doesn't, and I've also been playing it safe with a really small aperture (to allow for the different focus point of IR light).

This year I was allowed to access one of the buildings in the city to see the fireworks. I set up the tripod with a shroud (to keep the reflections out). Unfortunately I must have bumped the focus ring while adjusting the tripod, as initial shots were in focus, but all the later ones were slightly out of focus. This year I decided to try an exposure stack, like star trails.

This is an abandoned unit block near where we were staying. It looks quite unassuming, in an anonymous, 70s/80s square kind of fashion, until you look a bit closer and see that all of the windows and doors are boarded up, with asbestos warnings everywhere.

I was too sick to work so we went to the park. Normally this Spotted-Tailed Quoll is asleep and out of the way, but we were lucky to see it today. I should have used a polariser to shoot through the glass, but I was caught on the hop. Processing it was a special challenge in de-emphasising reflections. There still are some reflections visible but I've cut out the major ones.

I saw these walls had had some holes kicked through and wanted to shine some lights through them into the room. Alan set up his big tripod with a red gel light and we hit it with the long exposures.
This is not originally what I had in mind (I wanted dust in the air and the light hitting that, but after a moment's reflection, kicking up dust in here seemed like a really bad idea).

I have found my water scene, though it is still the Brisbane River, just 35km downstream at Ipswich. I have also wanted to try stacking the infrared filter with the fisheye filter. It seems to have worked. After processing, this photo looks to me like an old slide where the red dye has faded away.
I wasn't planning to do light trails, but it worked out nicely that way.

Photo outing with Al, Mick, Anthony, David and Steve. During this long exposure, I walked toward the camera with a flashlight and umbrella (it was raining). I moved in a step, pause, step, pause fashion to ensure I my face made it into the shot.
Exposure was controlled via intervalometer, with a 30 second delay (for me to get far enough away) then a 30 second exposure. I also used the 2-second delay on-camera, which flashes a light out the front just as it's about to take the shot - this way I knew (in the dark, noisy jetty) when to start making my movements.

I took the water camera and my fisheye 0.42x filter into the surf for some boogie boarding fun. The surf was rough and I lost the filter when I got dumped off a wave (that was a risk I knowingly took), but I got the shot (and video) I wanted anyway.
This is a still from video, and was taken after I lost the fisheye filter.

Pulling weeds out of the garden, and this weed had grown in gravel. It kept its shape well when pulled out so I threw it on the platter and scanned away.
Note to self: Scanner can do 1200 dpi, but Lightroom + 2gb of RAM has a hard time with it. I think this is mainly a RAM issue as the computer just sits there thrashing. When I scan at 600 dpi, there is no problem at all, and the resolution is still high enough.

These little spiderlets have hatched and are ready to take on the world.
I set up the bird bath for crows again today, but they did not come out to play, again. So I went looking in the worm farm for some worms, but they were all hiding (I need to feed them more). However lots of spiders make their home in the worm farm as well, so I chose them for a subject. It's quite dark inside the lid of the worm farm, so a bit of phone light helped exposure. The directional light also provided some shadows which work so well with spider shots.

We took Evelyn down to the beach at sunset for some sand playing and portraits. Lui built up a big line of sandcastles and Evelyn took particular joy in demolishing every one of them.
I've been trying to get a photo of this decisive moment for a while now! It takes luck and time.

These statues were everywhere around Brisbane during the Brisbane Festival. I thought this guy looked awesome over the South Bank beach.
A problem with these was what to do with them after the festival was over.

+Al Warren has tagged me in the Five Day Quest virus/pyramid scheme. Take one photo of whatever is going on in your life and post it. This kinda ties in with my One Second Per Day video - yes, my video today is of me doing this shot.
I set up the tripod and triggered three x 5 second exposures of myself using the remote shutter.
+Mick Porter you are the only other photographer that I know on G+, so TAG, YOU'RE IT.

I love seeing things growing where they shouldn't be. I had walked past this many times and had planned to take a snap "one day". Today, I had not had any ideas by home time, and I was walking with Joanne to the station and talking about cameras, so decided that today was the day to grab this shot. I don't think it's a fantastic photo but isn't too bad...

Balanced lens on the edge of the frying pan, on an oven mit (to avoid melting). There was a bit of hot oil splashing about but I was able to wipe that off.
I used a smaller aperture to capture a higher depth of field, since the wide-open depth of field with the macro lens is measured in atoms. This meant I couldn't hand-hold it though, with the resulting slower shutter speed.

I've been reading up on star trails for about a month now, and planning out what style (single exposure or composite), location (I thought our place at Ipswich would have too much light pollution - apparently not), and other such details. I wasn't expecting this test shot to be much of anything, but it turned out alright. It is a composite of 88 x 30-second exposures, combined in Startrails.

Lui pointed this tree out last week, so I filed it in the ideas factory. This is a wall on the river-side of the shopping centre. The tree itself is the same kind of fig that we found growing on the roof of our shed.

I was cleaning up in the kitchen before work and was about to put a strawberry in the bin, when I noticed that it had grown a little. Strawberries seem to grow very quickly if not kept refridgerated, in my experience, and this one had been left out over night. I used my mini-tripod pointing down at the strawberry to capture the mould.

This is the vacant lot from last week, but after talking with Alan Warren about shooting it ultra-wide, I thought I'd give it a go myself. This is taken with the fisheye filter, then stretched out in Lightroom.

+Al Warren has tagged me in the Five Day Quest virus/pyramid scheme. Take one photo of whatever is going on in your life and post it.
I like to run. I prefer to run in the mornings, as I have no set commitments between 4 and 8am, and I don't really need to be awake to run.
I set this up by putting the camera on the ground, setting a 10-second timer and a 2.5 second exposure. About half-way into the exposure, I jumped into shot and held until the shutter closed.
+David Hill, tag - you're it.

This is a re-take of a shot I took yesterday, but which I didn't choose for the photo of the day (see below on what I would have done differently). It was a sun-kissed 1 degree outside and I had my gloves off to operate the iPhone's touch screen, so it's fairly amazing that I did 42 takes to get this shot. I wanted to have cars moving in the background to add a bit of life and a sense that no-one cared about this casualty.

Both Lynnette and Lucinda were thoroughly unimpressed with what I had planned to post, so I went out and snapped this sculpture that hangs from the ceiling of our local shops. This is a callback to the mining roots of this city. Mum asked me to take a photo of this about a year ago... so here it is, Mum!

Today we all went for a drive to visit my family from Dad's side, so they could meet young Evelyn. This was at Burleigh Heads - stopped for a feed and change, as you do. A photographer there helped me with some tips, and suggested this pose.

This painting on a bridge pylon has had me baffled for a long time. I just don't know what they're getting at with "Cash Orders On Own Our Store Only". Moreover, I don't understand why this is painted on a bridge.

This is a rare vacant lot in the Brisbane CBD. It's well sealed up but I was able to peek through.
I shot this yesterday, but chose another picture to post. This time, I knew what I was going for, and made sure the exposure and depth of field were as good as they could be.